The Steepest Way Down

The fog came up the hill like something poured, and by the time Maya noticed it had swallowed the trail markers, there were no markers left to notice.

"We can't see the path," Soren said. His glasses had gone to beads of water. He took them off, which made everything worse, and put them back.

"We don't need to see the path," Maya said. "The car's at the bottom. Down is down."

The shelter was three log walls and a tin roof that drummed. Outside, the world was the color of breath. They could see maybe ten steps in any direction before the gray closed in.

Soren crouched and felt the ground with his hand. Cold mud, a slope of it, tilting away to his left. "Okay. But which down? It slopes every direction a little."

"The steepest one." Maya was already at the edge of the shelter, her boot testing the dirt. "Whichever way pulls hardest on the water. Follow the water and you find the bottom of the valley, and the bottom of the valley has the trail."

They stepped out into the pour.

It was strange, walking by feel. Maya kept her eyes half closed, which did not matter, and let her boots ask the question. Here the ground tipped right. So she went right. Ten steps. Now it tipped forward and a little left. So forward and a little left. The fog never opened. She never saw farther than the next few steps. But the next few steps were always enough, because there was always a direction that was more downhill than the others, and she could feel which one it was through the soles of her feet.

Soren followed, narrating under his breath. "Steeper here. Steeper this way. We're not aiming at anything. We can't even see anything. We're just always going down the most."

"And it's working," Maya said. Water ran past their boots now in real threads, all of it heading the same place they were.

They came to a flat spot and stopped. The mud here pooled. Maya turned a slow circle, boot probing. Every direction out of the flat went up.

"Dead end," she said. "It's a bowl. We walked into a dip and now everything around us is uphill."

Soren felt it too, the little basin of it, the way the water gathered at their feet instead of running on. "So the steepest-down rule lied. It brought us to the lowest place. But it's only the lowest place right here. The car could be way lower, over that ridge, and we'd never know, because to get there we'd have to go up first."

The rain hammered the tin somewhere behind them. They stood in their little wrong bowl, soaked, found by the very rule that had been right the whole way.

Maya laughed, a short surprised sound. "This is the thing my cousin does. The computer thing."

"What computer thing."

"She teaches the programs. The ones that learn faces and stuff. She showed me on her laptop, this picture like a landscape with hills and valleys, except she said it had a million directions instead of two. And the program can't see any of it. It's blind, like us. It just feels which way is downhill and takes a step. Feels again. Steps again." Maya wiped rain off her face with a wet sleeve, which did nothing. "Getting better at recognizing a cat is the same as getting lower on the hill. Down means more right."

Soren went still in the rain. Then he crouched and put both hands flat in the gathered water, feeling the bowl all around him, the trap of it. "Then this happens to them. The programs. They walk into a bowl and the whole world around them goes uphill and the rule says stop, you're at the bottom, when they're really just at a bottom."

"My cousin said that's the scary part." Maya crouched beside him. "Millions of directions. No way to look at the whole shape. No eyes. Just the slope under your feet, one step at a time, forever. She said it should get stuck constantly. In bowls like this."

"But it doesn't?"

"That's the part nobody understands." Maya's voice dropped under the rain. "She said the smartest people who do this for a living don't actually know why it works. In a million directions there's almost always some way that's still down, some direction that gets you out, so the program almost never really gets stuck. The bowls turn out to have secret doors. But here, with our two feet on a hill, there's only a few ways to go. So we get the trap they almost never get."

Soren stayed crouched, hands in the cold water, and Maya watched him work it through, the rain running off the end of his nose.

"So everything that knows anything," he said slowly, "every program that learned to read or talk or see, found its way down a hill it couldn't see, in more directions than we can picture, taking one blind step at a time toward whatever made it less wrong. And nobody knows why the hill lets them through."

"Nobody," Maya said. "They just keep stepping. And it keeps working."

The fog thinned, not much, just enough. Soren stood. He looked at the lip of the bowl, the low place in its rim where the water had cut a little notch and was spilling out, going somewhere.

"There," he said. "The water found a door. We go up a little, there, where it leaves."

Maya was already moving. They climbed the few uphill steps out of the trap, against the rule, the only way the rule would ever let them leave, and on the far side the ground tipped away steep and sure under their boots. The threads of water became a runnel, the runnel a little stream, all of it pulling downhill, and them with it, blind and certain, one good step at a time.

The stream ran out of the fog ahead of them and kept going, down and down, and somewhere down there it knew the way to the bottom even though neither of them could see it yet.